Part I: Sowing seed

Alton W. Barron was about 23 the night his young wife caught him with an 18-year-old redhead named Betty Lou.

His wife, Nina Looney, already had two babies to look after when the 22-year-old saw her lanky husband and a waitress out on a winter’s night in downtown Des Moines.

Nina Looney and A. W. "Dub" Barron in an undated photo from the 1940s. Barron married Looney in July of 1945.(Photo: Submitted family photo)

The year was 1949. Barron, a larger-than-life charmer who had a rapacious appetite for women, tried to spirit the waitress out of town in his Cadillac. Looney didn't know it, but Betty Lou was pregnant — about 8½ months.

Looney flagged a cab and gave chase. South of Des Moines, the Cadillac ran out of gas.

Looney would later tell others that she bashed out Barron’s windows with a crowbar that night on the side of the highway, leaving the father of her children out in the cold.

But for Barron, leaving and never looking back became a lifestyle, and dodging pregnant women and angry husbands his second nature.

Over the next three decades, the charismatic rake from Tyler, Texas, would carry on dozens of affairs in California, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin while he was married to at least eight women.

While driving a cab, working construction, selling cars, fixing radiators or working on an oil rig, Barron would father more than a dozen children across the U.S. and in Indonesia. Along the way, he would face charges of bigamy and statutory rape.

Many of the young women whom Barron wooed and left considered him a scoundrel the rest of their lives.

But like Looney, several took him back anyway — if only for a private rendezvous — when he would circle back to town.

Barron’s kin would joke years later that the 6-foot-4, blue-eyed libertine was allergic to latex.

"We woke up many a night to a phone call with some girl crying, asking, 'Is he down there? He’s left me,'" his half-brother Bob Sexton recalled. "Course, he had probably left her with a little present."

But not even Sexton, Barron's closest confidant, could have predicted the widespread impact of his brother's recklessness.

When Sexton was 11 and Barron 17, their mother was killed in a crash caused by a drunk cabbie.

The younger brother was taken in by family but preferred the company of his extroverted older brother. The two became close friends, and, whenever Barron felt the need to leave behind his latest romantic conquest, they were partners on the road.

“I was sort of like the sidekick in an old Western,” said Sexton, now 86.

In the early 1950s, when Barron was in his late 20s, the brothers took to the roads of Texas, Iowa and Indiana. They drank together, got in fights together and flopped at their girlfriends' homes, looking for ways to make easy money.

One scheme, Sexton said, was to paint house numbers on curbs in front of houses and leave notes saying they were veterans working for donations.

The two would go home, have a few beers and return at night to knock on the doors of people whose house numbers they had painted. More often than not, they would leave with a cigar box full of cash — and a new flirtation.

"I always had fun with it. Dub said he always got a kick out of watching me, the way I would grin and carry on," Sexton said. "Like this one woman … she was in her 30s. When she come to the door, I said, 'Is your mother home?'"

While Barron had more swagger than his half-brother, his success with women had more to do with playing the odds than charisma, family members said.

He tried his luck at roadside diners, store windows, truck stops, dance halls, cafeterias — with women young and old, married and single.

In those years following World War II, more women were asserting independence and more marriages were strained.

Barron's pickup lines worked, Sexton said.

Girlfriends would give him gifts: a shotgun for hunting, clothes, a place for Sexton and Barron to flop for weeks at a time. One woman let Barron run up her credit at grocery stores to fill his trunk.

Years later, Barron’s nieces and nephews would recall him dropping in from “up north” with silver dollars in his pocket and bicycles as gifts. He’d sweep in to pay a hospital bill for a sick relative who didn’t ask and to give his lady friends jewelry.

One nephew, whose family was broke and living in a motel, recalls how his flashy uncle bought him a lawnmower to help him make side money.

She gave birth to Michael in August 1952, after Barron moved from Des Moines to California. For years, Norma Banks rented homes on Des Moines’ southeast side.

Michael Banks remembers yearning as a child for the “Leave It to Beaver” life of others in the neighborhood.

To his delight, Barron returned to Norma when he was 5, staying about six months.

It was enough time to develop lasting memories of his father hoisting him into the driver’s cab of a bulldozer that Barron learned to operate to work on the construction of Interstate 35.

Michael Banks holds a stuffed teddy bear Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018, given to him by A.W "Dub" Barron at this location on Dean Ave. in Des Moines, Iowa. Michael Banks recalls breaking down outside his mother's house in Des Moines in Oct. of 1959 when he realized his father was leaving. "He tried to console me by giving me a stuffed red-and-white bear from the back window of his car, where he had several," Banks said.(Photo: Rodney White/The Register)

Barron treated Michael to bacon and eggs at a neighborhood cafeteria — Dub favored waitresses all his life — and adopted a terrier he named "Rebel."

At Christmas, Barron drove Michael and Norma into the country and chopped down a tree for them.

"It didn't matter to him whose land it was," Michael Banks said.

He and his mother had no way of knowing Barron was already using another name — Allan Kain — to pick up new girlfriends in Des Moines and other towns.

Trouble with the law

By 1955, when Barron was 29, he had already abandoned at least six children and four mothers in Iowa and Texas, and his troubles in both states launched him to other locales.

Relatives said Barron was rumored to have married as many as four women in Louisiana and one in South Carolina after his relationship with Banks.

He went on to follow another woman from Indiana to Pennsylvania, fathering a daughter named Dena, who didn’t learn he was her dad until 2010.

In 1957, one of Barron’s Louisiana wives had him jailed for bigamy. Authorities in Baton Rouge got wind of three marriages after they approached one of his wives to repossess a car.

Barron's arrest made headlines around the country. He signed a statement admitting he married three women, but said he thought each had obtained a divorce. He never was convicted.

Norma Banks, who still pined for him in Des Moines, wrote and told him where he could find her after he was released from jail.

Barron returned to Des Moines in 1959 but saw Norma and Michael, then 7, for only a few days.

Michael Banks remembers breaking down outside his mother’s house in Des Moines when he realized his father was leaving again.

“He tried to console me by giving me a stuffed red-and-white bear from the back window of his car, where he had several,” Banks said.

A few months later, Norma Banks would discover she was pregnant with a second son from Barron.

Over that next year, three children — Lori Stangl, Candi Hoyt and Michael Banks’ younger brother, Matthew — would be born to three women in Iowa.

But by then, the 33-year-old Barron was in Wisconsin, getting ready to marry 16-year-old Kathleen Joseph, telling her that he was 22.

Al "Dub" Barron passed himself off as 22-year-old Allan Kain when he married 16-year-old Kathleen Joseph in 1960 in Wisconsin.(Photo: Special to the Register)

That same year in Portage, Wisconsin, Barron was accused of having sex with another teenage girl who was younger than 16. He was charged with statutory rape.

When Joseph, his new bride, found out, Barron had a story ready. He told her he had rejected the teen’s advances and she then accused him of trying to rape her, according to Connie Hoye, Joseph’s daughter.

“For bail, he put up land in Texas that he didn’t own,” Hoye said. “When they let him out, he hightailed it.”

Despite that, Joseph, Barron's teenage bride, hopped a train in the middle of the night to meet her new husband in Washington state. From there, the two moved to San Rafael, California, and eventually Minneapolis.

Not long after Hoye was born, another woman showed up on her family’s doorstep in Minnesota with the woman's father and another baby in tow. Dub wasn't home at the time. The woman never came back.

Back in Tyler, Dub’s brother had long since decided to marry and settle down. He and others worried their footloose relative was in over his head.

​​​​​​About this series

"Gone Daddy" is based on the recollections of more than a dozen members of Alton W. Barron's family, newspaper clippings and court records. Many of the women with whom Barron fathered children have since died. The woman named Betty Lou is now 86 and still lives in Iowa. She asked that her last name and current residence not be used.

HOW YOU CAN HELP: Recognize Alton W. Barron or think you may know one of his children, former girlfriends or wives? His family is seeking information. Contact them at awbarron805@gmail.com.

About the reporter

Lee Rood has been a reporter and editor at the Register for more than 20 years. In January 2013, she created The Reader's Watchdog to help Iowans find answers and seek accountability from government, business and nonprofits. Before becoming a columnist, she was the Register's investigative editor, producing and writing several award-winning projects that spurred new state and national legislation, led to criminal investigations and produced wide-ranging results for everyday Iowans.

Undated family photos of A.W. "Dub" Barron, shown during a visit by his adult children to Barron's half-brother Bobby Sexton's home in Tyler, Texas, Sept. 1, 2018.(Photo: Rodney White/The Register)